The language people use to talk about death is shrouded in euphemism. It's as if because the subject can be difficult to deal with, calling it something else might help to soften the blow.

You might argue that a formulaic phrase such as "I'm sorry for your loss" has its place, a sympathetic gesture easily understood by both bereaved and comforter. But too often euphemisms can undermine attempts at sympathy and even diminish a death.

Perhaps out of respect for Raisa, the late horse, or to spare the feelings of its former human carer, Rebekah Brooks, or the Metropolitan police, a recent news story saying the animal had "passed away" demonstrated that the Guardian is not immune from this.

Our roundup of the sportsmen and women who died last year was headlined "Tributes to the sports stars who lost their lives in 2011". The well-meaning but wrongheaded phrase "lost their lives" suggests they had perhaps perished in a natural disaster, but it turned out that most had died quietly of old age, although two had killed themselves (or "taken their own lives" as the hypersensitive headline writer would presumably have put it). At least we were spared being told that they had gone to join the great referee or umpire in the sky.

Meanwhile, the Guardian Guide said of Amy Winehouse's death that "Amy's passing put a subdued edge on the rest of the year". There's a tweeness about that "passing" that seems especially inappropriate when describing Winehouse, a notably unsentimental artist.

Given that newspapers are in the business of communication, a simple "Tributes to the sports stars who died in 2011" or "Amy's death put a subdued edge on the rest of the year" would have been clear and effective. Surely we write about death all too often to be embarrassed by it.

Politicians use euphemism to disguise unpleasant truths. Thus sacking people is "letting them go" and cutting jobs is "productivity"; plastic bullets are "attenuated energy projectiles"; victims of pointless wars are not deaths but "fatalities"; civilians are not killed but, grotesquely, become "collateral damage".

We should have no part of this. A blogpost in the Economist noted: "As the late George Carlin, an American comedian, noted, people used to get old and die. Now they become first pre-elderly, then senior citizens and pass away in a terminal episode or (if doctors botch their treatment) after a therapeutic misadventure. These bespeak a national yearning for perfection, bodily and otherwise."

Monty Python's parrot may have ceased to be, expired and gone to meet his maker, kicked the bucket, shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. But people die. Let's allow them to do so with dignity.